Issue Eleven

Here I was again, crouching in a relatively clean bathtub with a taco in one hand and a novel in the other, waiting for rescue. Knowing it would be a while, I decided to settle in and enjoy my food despite the chaos just outside the locked bathroom door.

Which was evidently not locked after all, because I was halfway through the taco when a very drunk someone stumbled inside, humming a Taylor Swift song and chuckling. I could see enough through the plastic shower curtain to ascertain that the invader was large, male, and so impaired that he had neglected to close the door behind him, allowing the roar of ugly music and drunken laughter to follow him inside. Even the sounds of the party, however, could not drown out the most chilling and ominous noise ever to enter my ears- the whirrrr of a descending pants zipper. No. I could only pray that he had consumed nothing but illicit liquids in the past few hours. If he takes a dump here, I will die.

The fragrant smells of pee and beer drifted through the room and assaulted my sinuses. Gagging, I dropped the taco and ducked my head and hands inside of my sweater, creating a scent-proof chamber of respite from the toxic atmosphere. I shot off another S.O.S. text to Nate, dialed his number, and got sent straight to voicemail. When is he going to get here? I counted down slowly from twenty to keep myself sane. Human Niagara Falls was still peeing.

It had definitely been over a minute, and the stream of pee was going strong. It was inhuman. Just when I thought my lungs would give out, my phone buzzed with a text from Nate: here. I indulged in one last safe breath from the inside of my sweater and flung the shower curtain aside, keeping my burning eyes firmly fixed on the doorway, even as the Pantless Wonder strolled away from the toilet towards me. He attempted to greet me, and, failing to form a complete sentence, decided to take up residence in the tub I had just vacated. Kanye blaring on the speakers behind me, I lunged my way up the basement stairs three at a time, reaching for the light above like someone buried alive.

When I emerged into the cool October evening, the first thing I saw was Nate’s baby blue Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled up by the curb. Ugly and dinged up as it was, I had never been so happy to see that lump of metal. Nate rolled down a window and smiled.

“Hey, Del. Nice evening, hmm?”

“Let me in, Nate.”

“Not yet. I think some thanks would be in order first, don’t you?” He batted his eyelashes at me. I knew Nate, and I knew we weren’t going anywhere until I played along with his little game.

“I Delilah Thomas, lame and loserly nerd, hereby attest to the boundless and magnificent greatness of Nathan O. Brinkley, the most dazzlingly attractive and intellectually dominant man of all time!” I cried with the zeal of a TV preacher, banging a fist on the hood of the car. “Now let me in, idiot.”

“Beep. Beep. Beep.” Nate shook his head slowly, with the utmost regret. “Terribly sorry, Del, but my sarcasometer is detecting a slight lack of authenticity in your praises. Perhaps if you tried some more flattering adjectives? A salute? An interpretive dance?”

“Nathan O. Brinkley, so athletically stunning!- beep– utterly hilarious! –beep!- unparalled in wit and charm!- beep beep beep– the shining beacon of-,”

“BEEP BEEP BEEP. The sarcasm is off the charts! I’m afraid you’re going to be stuck out there for a very long time if you can’t find it in your heart to-,”

“Nathan, you let me in that ugly tin can of a car this second or I swear I’ll tell your mother about your little…camping incident.” I raised my eyebrows in what I hoped was a menacing expression. “I’m sure Susan would be delighted to hear about the creative way you put out the fire.”

Pouting, Nate popped open the lock on the passenger side of his dinged-up Jeep and let me inside. I collapsed into the cracked leather seat, tossing my purple paisley Goodwill tote bag onto the floorboards, where it joined the ranks of a greasy Wendy’s bag, a stained basketball sock, and approximately fifty pages of cello sheet music.

“That was even worse than I thought it was going to be,” I muttered, pressing my flushed forehead against the cool glass of the window. “No one talked. The only time people opened their mouths was to chug Coors. And they were playing Kanye.” The stale warm air trickling from the vents smelled like an Island Breeze Febreze plugin. Susan must’ve bought it. Nate would never have thought of something like that by himself.

“Del, you knew you were gonna hate it. Why do you keep going to these things when you always end up bailing in the first hour?” Nate took his eyes off the road for a fraction of a second to give me his best why-don’t-you-just-listen-to-your-reasonable-best-friend look. His slanted eyes were a warm toasted brown, like a mug of coffee in the morning.

I picked at a loose thread on my sleeve. “I dunno. I think it makes my dad feel better when I go out. Otherwise he thinks he’s a screw-up father raising a screw-up kid who only leaves her room to play FIFA at the neighbor’s house.”

Nate reached over to flick my knee. “You do only leave your room to play FIFA at my house.”

“Not true! I go out. To school. And the library. And Fro-Yo Jo’s.”

He snorted. “Ah, yes, aren’t you just the picture of social competence! Be honest, now- how crazy do you get with those librarians on Friday nights?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say to someone who just saved you from certain death.”

I twisted a few strands of my hair into a braid, noticing for the first time the fraying split ends at the bottom. Mom always used to make my haircut appointments for me. “Sorry. I’m just worried. Dad has been really down lately. He hasn’t eaten anything but Goldfish and orange Fanta in two weeks.”

Nate nodded. His freckles were invisible in the dark, but I knew the one at the corner of his eyebrow would be twitching, the way it does when he’s thinking hard. “Poor guy. But you gotta give him some time, Del. It’s only been a year. It’s normal for people to take that much time to recover, after…you know.”

“It didn’t take me a year. I’m fine.” I stared out the window, catching a glimpse of the one and only street sign for miles: Carver Mountain Road. Nate loved driving back roads, but they freaked me out. No lights, and nothing but pine trees and dead deer lining the street. Creepy.

“Well, you’re not exactly normal, are you? Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

Rather than answer him, I turned up the radio. Tim McGraw’s Live Like you were Dying crackled out of the speakers.

“Hey, no playing that country crap in my car!” Nate punched the power button with his pointer finger. I hit it on again, defiant for no other reason than to be annoying. Laughing, he turned it off. I reached for the button again, but he caught my hand in his cello-callused one and lowered it, firmly but gently, to the console between us, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I stared at our hands, mouth suddenly dry.

Nate saw me looking and smiled. “Del. I wasn’t exactly planning on having this conversation tonight. Maybe it’s not the best time, but I’ve been trying to say this for weeks.”

Oh.

I had waited for this moment for so long, had wanted it so badly, but now that it was happening my intestines churned like I might throw up. My knees jiggled madly like that time I drank a Monster and an espresso in the same hour. I swallowed, tried to keep my voice from wobbling.

“Nate, I don’t-,”

He squeezed my hand, cutting me off.

“I want you to think about this before you answer, Del. Really think.” I nodded, mute. I swear I could feel the swirls of his fingerprints on my skin.

“I know this has been a rough year for you. Our families have been through so much together. So if you’re not ready, or you just see me as a neighbor and a best friend, I get it.” His eyes were so brown, his dark eyebrows scrunched so far together they almost touched.

“You can say no, and we can forget this conversation ever happened. But if you want to try, I mean, if you think we can make this work…” He paused, pushed a hand through his too-long black hair, and exhaled. “Well, that would make me really happy.”

I looked down. If I looked him in the eye, I would break. I could feel him staring at me.

YES! screamed a voice inside my head. YES, I’LL DATE YOU! I LOVE YOU, YOU MORON! I’VE LOVED YOU SINCE WE WERE EIGHT!

Shut up, I told the voice. I needed to think about this logically. Nobody ends up with their high-school sweetheart, right? Was I willing to risk a lifetime of friendship for the crappy odds that our relationship would actually work out? I couldn’t afford to lose Nate.

“Del?” But there he was, holding my hand so tightly, looking at me with those annoying, beautiful eyes and smelling like Old Spice shampoo and Susan’s laundry detergent.

If I let this chance go by, would he ever ask again? The air between us seemed to tingle and pop like the air just before a lightning strike. Yes, I tried to say. I felt the word form in my throat, opened my mouth to say it.

I was still looking at our hands when it happened. I never saw the other car.

What I saw instead was the fast glint of headlights on my chipped glitter nail polish.

I saw Nate’s knuckles turn white as his hand tightened in mine.

I saw a thin line of black weep down my pale forearm and pool in my palm, dripping over into Nate’s.

The smell of blood, rich and nauseating, bloomed like a red rose in the humid evening air. Nate was making sounds, tearing, screaming sounds that rattled in the back of his throat with each exhale.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Nate, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.”

I was still saying it when the paramedics arrived. I was still saying it when they took my hand out of Nate’s.

 

 

 

Jessie is a Creative Writing student at Reinhardt University. Her work has appeared in Copia, Sanctuary, and the Georgia Historical Quarterly, as well as onstage in Waleska’s third annual 24-hr Play Festival. She is currently on the editing staff of the James Dickey Review and runs StreetSigns, a faith-based blog.

I knew a girl who listened to space punk.

“What’s that?” I asked her every Monday. She always had a different response. Terry bet that she kept a list of random definitions in that thick notebook I mentioned she had tucked under her arm all the time. “She just wants to mess with you,” Terry assured me. Its cover had a picture of the galaxy taped onto it. She told me it was to remind us that space was always there, whether we could see it or not. Her name was Comet.

“It’s on my birth certificate,” she claimed. I believed her.

Terry asked me why I always talked to Comet. I told him because she reminded me of the stars. He furrowed his eyebrows and shook his head, but his response left me unaffected. He wouldn’t understand; he never met her, anyways. As I laid awake almost every night, thinking of Comet and the galaxy and Terry’s disapproval, I watched the stars and hoped they’d take me to a cloud. Maybe I could sleep there. Melatonin sure never helped.

The next Monday I asked her about space punk again, expecting a different answer. “You can’t hear it?” she questioned. “It’s everywhere.” My heart skipped two beats; she gave me that answer the first day we met on the city bus. She was bobbing her head to the music, each beat hypnotizing her soul and connecting her to the shining solitude of the moon.

“You told me that before,” I remarked.

Comet grinned. “I did.”

Terry was positive she was an escapee from a mental institution, but I wasn’t sure about that speculation. Her mind was Harvard-bound. She spoke of philosophy and abstract mathematics like it was child’s blabber. She told me about the origin of the stars and the moon and the sun with such simplicity a toddler could understand. The Earth is our mother; we get our emotions and human nature from her. “And if they could, Earth and Neptune would become one,” she taught me on our way back home from school. “Nothing is more alluring than something we can only see from a distance.”

One night, on a Tuesday this time, Comet stared at me with a beam on her face. It was as if the moon possessed her lips, its radiance pushing through to challenge the light of the sun. Her straight brown hair was doing gymnastics on her head. Each strand was in a different pose, creating a massive mess above her wrinkled forehead. She was elegantly insane.

“I’m going to the concert,” she announced.

She had never mentioned one to me before. “What concert?”

“Space punk.” She buried her face in her hands, the soft squeals emitting from her mouth and giving me chills.

“I thought space punk is everywhere.”

“Everywhere originates from somewhere. Can you come?”

I reminded her that I don’t sleep. She told me to meet her the next day at midnight near the school. The first minute of Thursday. According to her, I’d meet Saturn and Mars. I wondered what they looked like the rest of the day.

Comet didn’t come to school that Wednesday. She was preparing for the concert, I assumed. I went out and bought myself a galaxy shirt and black shorts the color of the darkest night. That evening, my fingers quivered as I made my way to the school. I was wide awake, about to hear space punk in ten minutes. If only Terry was invited.

Comet sat on the concrete ground ten feet in front of me. She looked so alone as she hummed along to the music. As I approached, she turned her head and acknowledged my presence.

“You’re here,” said Comet. “It’s time. Close your eyes.”

My eyes shut, revealing the pitch black underneath my eyelids. I heard Comet’s soothing voice whispering in my ear. “Feel the coolness of the stars and the heat of the moon. Get to know them and listen to the beat.” I did.

What I heard, in the thickness of my euphoric apprehension, was a sensational array of celestial rhythms and heavenly lyrics. The words were in a tongue only ones connected to the night could understand. Each beat — the ticks and the dits and the zooms — was followed by a different reverberation: meteors crashing, the destruction of supernovas, the loving words of the planets. Melodies striked my eardrums from every direction. Space was everywhere.

“I hear it. Space punk is beautiful,” I told her. There was no response. Comet had disappeared and so did the music. I didn’t realize until I opened my eyes.

Comet never came back to school. Terry guessed she was brought back to the asylum, but I know she was brought back to the stars, her mission of gifting me with the galaxy that cursed me of wakefulness fulfilled. Now when I close my eyes, the cosmic experience vibrates through my body and sends my mind to the skies. Space punk is my method of slumber. And when I lift my eyelids and the harmonies escape me, I admire the neverending galaxy. There, I can see Comet dancing in the sky, entranced by the infectious rhythms. It’s so alluring to watch from afar.

 

 

Worlanyo is a seventeen-year-old cinephile from New Jersey. You can find her absorbed in a classical movie, writing stories on her laptop, or gazing into the night sky long past midnight. She has been published on Voices of Youth.

Alan hadn’t wanted to spend his last free Saturday at an amusement park, but Hui Jie had insisted on it. They would be in different branches of Singapore’s army after conscription next week, after all—Hui Jie would be training for police service and Alan would be in the infantry—and he argued they needed to have one last celebration. Alan didn’t want to start a fight, so he paid for a train ticket and came along.

The amusement park they arrived at had been built by an American company. There was supposed to be Asian food there, but all Alan could see was the neon signs and loud smells of Western restaurants. Not that it mattered: Hui Jie wouldn’t stop to eat, even though Alan had skipped breakfast to catch the train. Instead, he ran straight to the nearest roller coaster, a massive one called Silver Dragon. Alan struggled to catch up with him.

They wove through the long line in front of the coaster slowly, Hui Jie cracking jokes and Alan nodding along while the sun beat down on his neck. The line reminded him of his military medical exam from a few months ago. He’d lined up with countless other teenage boys outside the local doctor’s office, filed into the examination building, then walked out in a half hour with a promise that they’d be conscripted in Singapore’s army. Alan secretly hoped that the doctors would find something wrong with him and he’d be prevented from joining the army’s ranks, but his assignment to basic training came in the mail anyway.

Eventually they made it to the front of the line and got their first glimpse of the coaster cars. Alan had hoped they would look like dragons from Alan’s childhood stories, noble creatures that flew in the sky above the small, petty humans. But they were just old pieces of metal, a dull, earthy gray instead of the silver he had been promised.

The two of them clambered into one of the cars as an employee read through the safety rules. Hui Jie was grinning as the announcer finished and the ride clambered upwards, but Alan stayed straight-faced. He wasn’t a fan of roller coasters, so instead of focusing on the ride, he let his mind get lost in the blue ocean and the buildings on the other side of it. For a moment he thought he had sailed off the rails and was flying across the island, but then he realized they had just stopped at the end of the ride. His safety restraint lifted and he clambered back onto the main platform, disappointed.

After they went on a few more rides, Hui Jie announced he was starving and ran to the food court to buy chicken rice. Alan got a cheap burger, but Hui Jie teased him for it, saying that he should be ashamed to eat food that didn’t come from his Chinese ancestors. “Just because your parents gave you a Western name doesn’t mean you should okay with Western food,” he said between big bites of rice.

“What’s wrong with burgers?” Alan asked. “And you took us to a Western amusement park today, you know.”

Hui Jie waved his hand dismissively. “That’s not what matters. It’s about representing your heritage wherever you are. That’s why want I want to enter police training and become a bureau chief. I’ll make my father and the Yang family name proud!” Hui Jie took on a soldier’s posture and made an exaggerated salute. Alan laughed but didn’t salute with him.

They got back into more lines for more roller coasters, and Alan quickly got sick of them. They were just glorified trains, really: they picked people up, drove them around in a loop, then dropped them off right back where they started. It felt uncomfortably similar to what Alan had heard the military service was like. He’d spend two years doing drills and exercises and learn to shoot a gun he’d never use, just because his country forced him to. And then what?

“And then what?” Hui Jie asked Alan, who was sitting down by a water fountain after asking for a break.

Alan watched the fountain sputter ungracefully and shrugged. “I want to go to college, but my family doesn’t have enough money for it, and I don’t know what I want to study.”

“If I’m police chief by then I can help cover some of your expenses.” Hui Jie laughed loudly, then grabbed Alan by the shoulders and grinned. “I’ll probably have a family to take care of, too, but I’ll help you out.”

As Hui Jie gripped his arm, Alan finally understood that Hui Jie was blustering. He was about to be stuck in the military for two years, so he tried to fight his fear by showing a fake enthusiasm. But at least Hui Jie was bold enough to try to look excited. Alan had stopped bothering to hide his dejection months ago.

Eventually the sky got dark and the park cleared out. Hui Jie was tired, and so was Alan, so they made their way to the train station by the park entrance. But before they left, Alan turned around to look at the first roller coaster they had gone on.

Silver Dragon was still running for its final few passengers. As the metal coaster car slowly climbed up an incline, Alan longed for it to be a real dragon, one that could carry him away from Singapore. He would clamber onto its shimmering back and let it take him to places that didn’t have security threats or conscription or roller coasters.

But that was just fantasy and nothing more. Alan turned back to the station where Hui Jie was waiting, showed the conductor his ticket, then sat down and let the train take him all the way home.

 

 

Chandler Wakefield is an undergraduate at Yale University. His nonfiction has been previously published at Forty-Eight Review. He blogs at thealbedo.wordpress.com and tweets at @WhitenedInk.

Elliot and Bev, that’s short for Beverly by the way, first met where they lived in the same building, on the upper east side of manhattan.I think it was that building on the corner of 92nd and Madison. You know, the one with the ice cream shop on the first floor.The ice cream shop made their home above it all the nicer as the constant hum of all those freezers was a comfort to them both and gave them added warmth. together, they used to like to watch all the kids stop for ice cream on the way home from school.

 

William Pikus is currently a student at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City. He is enrolled in a creative writing course for which this story was written.